…and I ain’t talkin’ about the Sade song which changed me life back in ’81. What I’m talkin’ ’bout is an article by ‘ethicist’ Randy Cohen of the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04FOB-ethicist-t.html

I have problems with this article.

First, his conclusion is that it is somehow ethical to download an illegal copy of any software (aka ‘intellectual property’) if you already own a legal copy. That’s rubbish to me. To me, the problem with all such arguments is that they don’t pass JC’s Hardware v. Software Ethical Smell Test (JCHVSEST®) which, as you already know, says the following:

If it smells fishy for hardware, it’s probably just as ethically cod-like for softwares

Look. You buy a great looking pair of jeans that really make your butt look great. You go on holiday to some totally bitchin’ place. On the first night out you reach for those go-to trousers only to find (to your horror) that you forgot to pack them. Do you…
a) Go to the local shop and purchase another
b) Go to a local […]

A while back I ranted on the enormous number of ‘free’ downloads of my stuff.

Now here is a very interesting article about how at least one company is making serious money helping record companies convert some of this activity into sales.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html

In short, Big Champagne gathers stats on P2P file sharing data as demographic marketing information; the frequency by which songs and artists are being downloaded in various cities, states and countries. They then sell this in digestible chart and spreadsheet form to record companies so they can determine which artists to push in which markets.

So while the record companies are trying like crazy to shut down P2P sites, they are also not above getting whatever benefit they can out of their predicament.

I’m sure you’re at least vaguely aware of all the valuable medical information that came out of those Nazi experiments during the war. Same deal. People have to hold their nose to use such data, but it’s just  too valuable to ignore simply because the source was so reprehensible. […]

This is Joe Clark, a writer in Toronto, working on a very interesting book on copyright reform. It refutes a lot of the extreme points of view on both sides of the ‘great divide’.

A lot of people who favour ‘free file sharing’, (aka ‘The Pirates’) like to use the Booze/Prohibition argument.

Hey, people drink so if you don’t make it legal people will bootleg it.

This is similar to the “People copied cassettes back in the day, so why can’t they copy CDs now you hyopcrite?” argument; filled with more flaws than swiss cheese. (OK, maybe yer average Emmentaler has more holes than flaws, but hey everyone misuses their analogies, right?)

And that’s the point.

Yeah, people have been drinking since before Bacchus. Gettin’ high is a basic human need. End of story. And people have probably been copying art since the days of cave paintings. But everyone except William Burroughs recognises that crack is different from beer. The ‘quality’ (the intensity of the high) is very different.

I’ve been making beer for a number of years. One myth is that the first beer maker was some Egyptian who left his maypo out after breakfast and forgot about it. A few weeks later, he decided to drink the […]

Look, down deep, people are either liberal or conservative. You know it. I know it. We feel a certain way about things and then grow our ideas to fit those predelictions. I felt P2P was wrong the day I first checked out Napster. But for years I couldn’t articulate it well. Maybe I still can’t.

I kept hearing supposedly reasonable people talk about the good side of P2P their arguments sounded like Saruman speaking from the tower. I thought back to my youth and the massive collection of cassette tapes I kept from parties, gigs. The library. Why was that OK and not CD copying? Or MP3 sharing? The arguments from the pirates strike me as absolutist; because there is no intrinsic difference between what I was doing in 1975 vs. what kids are doing today, I am a total hypocrite for decrying copying as ‘wrong’. But absolutism is a false logic. And here’s where I’m at now. I think there are four problems with this ‘copying is copying’ mentality’.

1. It’s […]